Thursday, January 07, 2016

Jews ain't all that

In terms of religious affiliation, Jews are the smartest, right? Not so fast. I'll use the vocabulary quiz from the General Social Survey again as a proxy for IQ. I calculated the mean score for whites--IQ is affected a great deal by the racial composition of the group--but will only list selected religions. (The GSS continues to piss me off for not asking if one is Mormon--my favorite group.)

8 comments:

Are these scores for whites by religion? If so, I wouldn't be surprised by the high score for Buddhists. Whites who get into Buddhism seem to be highly intelligent, highly educated types and also seem to include a lot of secular ethnic Jews who have high IQs on average to begin with. I'm a bit surprised by the low scores for Muslims though, as people in general with lower IQs aren't going to be very attracted to new or foreign religions and cultures without social or cultural pressure. They're mainly going to attract people with intellectual interest, and that usually presupposes higher IQ. The only white Muslim converts I've come across in the US have been a law professor and legal scholar who got really into Islamic jurisprudence, and a former seminarian who was really into the philosophy of religion.

I previously ran something similar in which Jews came out on top. One minor suggestion I'd make for whenever the Wordsum variable is used is to pair it with BORN(1) as a filter. Especially when you're looking at groups with proportionally high numbers of foreign-born, wordsum can be problematic since it's administered in English.

The data seems to support the view that Islam is a religion for "low IQ proles", be they white, black or brown (or yellow). Converts to Islam here in Germany are mostly from the lower classes: disillusioned youth who seek a simple white-black worldview.

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"The creation myth was the essential bond that held the tribe together. It provided its believers with a unique identity, commanded their fidelity, strengthened order, vouchsafed law, encouraged valor and sacrifice, and offered meaning to the cycles of life and death. No tribe could survive long without the meaning of its existence defined by a creation story. The option was to weaken, dissolve, and die." ~ E.O. Wilson